Joshua Tree NP (1522)

I've seen the same thing here in Chicago. I tell people I grew up in Kentucky, a mere 300 miles south of here, and people assume its some tropical sauna. Of course, people in Kentucky think Chicago is some sort of Arctic tundra. In reality, the difference works out to the autumn leaves changing a week or two earlier here and the spring blooms come out a week or two later, but otherwise the weather's roughly the same.

Admittedly, when I was a young kid, I assumed it started snowing as soon as you went north of the Florida border. BUT, it is true that due to being on the boundary between prairie and lake, Chicago has much more window and thus wind chill than Kentucky, right?

The lake's effect on temperature or wind chill is usually confined to something less than a quarter-mile from the shore. (Prevailing winds usually blow the other way, and the adiabatic effect you see along the ocean is much weaker along the lake.) There's a much stronger effect along the lake's eastern shore. And the prairie to the west really isn't significantly more windy than the hillier places to the south. It's far less windy out there than, say, the High Plains in Kansas or Nebraska. The whole "Windy City" thing is a bit of a myth.